There were several times this weekend when I tried to log into Foursquare to check in, but was unable to do so. Needless to say, I was upset.
Martin Bryant posted an interesting opinion piece this morning about this very topic. Foursquare downtime does matter to people, and from the reaction of the service being down, it solidifies the fact that many people are relying on the service.
It is an interesting stance to take, but it does have some truth to it. How many people complain when Twitter is down, or when Facebook is not working as well as it should? Foursquare should probably be more worried if people didn’t care that their service was experiencing downtime. But it is a solid sign that people do care when the service is down.
Another interesting way to look at it is whether people would really care if a geolocation competitor was down. Gowalla? Loopt? Those services have yet to reach the overall success that Foursquare has experienced, and therefore, it would be much less likely that people would care when the service experienced downtime.
Is it fair to tie people complaining about downtime in with the popularity of a service? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
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